Theodore Roosevelt Abroad (13 page)

After enjoying five days of rest at Nairobi, Roosevelt departed for the Uasin Gishu plateau and the ‘Nzoi River which flowed not far from the foot of Mount Elgon. While on this hard march TR passed his fifty-first birthday, but they were unable to pause for the celebratory hunt as he would have liked. The landscape reminded him of northern California or southern Oregon rather than any tropical country. The nights were so cold that he had to wear a lumberman’s mackinaw he had not expected to use in Africa. The party arrived at the plateau on November 1, and from their first camp, shot giraffe, hartebeest, and oribi antelope for the Smithsonian. The giraffe camp was two days from the ‘Nzoi River which emptied into Lake Victoria Nyanza. They had crossed the divide to the Nile side of the watershed and the rivers no longer flowed into the Indian Ocean.

On the trek to the ‘Nzoi, TR was more interested in the honeyguides than the game. John Burroughs had especially charged him to look personally into the habits of these extraordinary little birds, the existence of which Burroughs was “inclined to disbelieve.” But their experiences in Africa confirmed the stories. In fact the birds at times became a real nuisance with their constant harsh chatter. Besides bee hives, they were also reputed to lead men to a serpent or wild beast, which Mearns experienced first hand when one of the honey-guides led him face to face with a rhinoceros.
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Mearns and Loring had stayed behind in Nairobi, preparing yet another shipment for the National Museum. Though they were treated extremely well by the British, the claims of the discovery of several new species by the American expedition in their domain irked some Englishmen who believed such finds should be reserved for the British Museum (Natural History). Consequently, an international race of sorts developed. Mearns confided to Walcott’s assistant at the Smithsonian that Roosevelt was “awfully pleased to have us get new species and describe them first” and wanted “quick action” on the fox of Naivasha. He asked the museum to “work up” the fox and “describe it, if new, without delay.” The English had scrambled to get ahead of them at every turn and the local game ranger, who had seen the fox, claimed it was the first ever taken. The British expected to bag their own specimen and were prepared to put it on the same steamer which would carry Mearns’ letter. Further, the English had rushed to send a collection of the fish of Lake Victoria to the British Museum (Natural History) when they learned he planned to collect there.
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Meanwhile, from his camp on the ‘Nzoi, TR’s expedition ran across the only other safari they would meet in almost a year in the wilds, that of Carl Akeley, who was hunting elephant for the American Museum of Natural History in New York. He and Roosevelt had planned to meet in Africa, but his departure had been delayed and he had thought TR had gone on to Uganda. The Colonel had already shot a bull elephant for the New York museum, but Akeley wanted Roosevelt to add a cow. As it happened, TR’s party had passed an elephant herd the day before which, since they already had their quota of the great beasts, Kermit only photographed. They all joined forces in pursuit of this herd, which was soon located. Using a huge anthill for cover, TR stalked to within sixty yards. Akeley expected Roosevelt to shoot at the cow he pointed out to him from behind the anthill, but instead the Colonel walked around it and began advancing towards the herd. He had an impulse to “climb on Roosevelt’s shoulder and whisper that I wanted him to shoot her, not take her alive.”
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TR got within thirty yards before the elephant saw him and when he opened fire, the herd charged. To stop this they were forced to kill one more cow than the two Akeley wanted for his museum. After the herd was turned Kermit shot a bull calf to complete the collection.

While Tarlton and Kermit returned to the camp to fetch the equipment and men needed to preserve the elephants, Akeley and Roosevelt rested in the shade of an acacia tree. TR talked of Edith and his children at home. He had not seen anyone from the United States for many months, while Akeley was fresh from America and had visited Oyster Bay before he left. In those three hours, Akeley later wrote, he got a “new view of Theodore Roosevelt.” It was then that he “learned to love him.” It was then that he realized he could “follow him anywhere; even if I doubted, I would follow him because I knew his sincerity, his integrity, and the bigness of the man.”
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Akeley also passed along an invitation to come to Constantinople for TR from his old friend Oscar Straus, who had accepted the Ambassadorship to Turkey. This his schedule would not allow. Instead the Colonel asked Straus and his wife to meet him at Cairo in March.
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His friend had also sent a bottle of cognac, which TR passed along to Cuninghame, who had a greater appreciation of such things.

Once the men and supplies returned, they pitched camp a hundred yards from the elephants and, TR recorded, Akeley and Tarlton, working like demons, “had the skins off the two biggest cows and the calf before nightfall.” That night they listened to the raucous chorus of the hyenas fighting among themselves as they gorged on the carcasses. Near morning a lion came along and “uttered a kind of booming long drawn moan, an ominous and menacing sound.” The hyenas replied with an “extraordinary chorus of yelling, howling, laughing, and chuckling, as weird a volume of noise” as any the Colonel had ever heard.
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At dawn he and Akeley crept out in their pajamas hoping to get a shot at the lion, but it was gone. As they came towards one carcass a hyena raised its head from inside and Roosevelt promptly shot it with his Springfield. But he need not have bothered as the animal had managed to push his wedge shaped head between a wall of muscle in the elephant’s stomach and then was unable to extract it. The hair was worn thin on his neck from his efforts but, Akeley wrote, he was “literally tied up in the thing that he loved best.”
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After saying his farewells to Akeley and his party, Roosevelt had the opportunity to witness a lion hunt of a different kind, carried out with spears by Nandi warriors. This was arranged by the district commissioner at Sergoi Lake, Mr. Corbett. Like the Masai, to whom they were kin, the Nandi were warlike pastoralists who, with intertribal warfare ended by British rule, were limited to lion killing as a rite of passage for their young men. Eight hundred warriors had volunteered and seventy were chosen for the privilege. On this hunt, across a rolling grass plain, Roosevelt’s duty was only to “round up the lion and hold him” for the advancing Nandi whom he described as

splendid savages, stark naked, lithe as panthers, the muscles rippling under their smooth dark skins; all their lives they had lived on nothing but animal food, milk, blood and flesh, and they were fit for any fatigue or danger. Their faces were proud, cruel, fearless; as they ran they moved with long, springy strides. Their headdresses were fantastic; they carried ox-hide shields painted with strange devices; and each bore in his right hand the formidable war spear . . . the narrow spear heads of soft iron were burnished till they shone like silver; they were four feet long and the point and edges were razor-sharp...each sinewy warrior carried his heavy weapon as if it were a toy, twirling it till it glinted in the sun-rays.
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At last they found their lion, a large, black-maned male in his prime lying near a hartebeest on which he had been feeding. TR was sorely tempted to shoot the magnificent beast himself but could not break faith with the Nandi who had come only on the condition that they could make the kill. One by one the spearman approached, forming a ring around the lion, each man crouching behind his shield, his spear in his right hand. The lion’s “mane bristled and his tail lashed” as he held his head low, facing first one way and now another, never ceasing to “utter his murderous grunting roars.” Once the ring was complete the Nandi closed in, the leader bounded ahead of his fellows to throwing distance, driving his weapon three feet deep, through the lion’s shoulder and out the opposite flank near the thigh. The mortally wounded lion nevertheless sprang on the man who covered himself as best he could with his shield as his fellows closed in with their own spears flashing to join the fight. Several other weapons were driven home but before the lion succumbed he managed to wound another Nandi and gripped a spearhead in his jaws with such force that it bent double.
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It was a wild sight Roosevelt would never forget and became perhaps his most recounted African story.

By this time back at home, a serious crisis over conservation policy, dubbed the Ballinger-Pinchot affair, had been added to Taft’s political troubles over the tariff and other matters.
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TR’s man Gifford Pinchot, still the chief of the Division of Forestry in the Agriculture Department, had come into conflict with Taft’s Secretary of the Interior, Richard Achilles Ballinger, over allegations of wrongdoing when Ballinger’s department allowed the allocation of coal lands in Alaska to a Morgan-Guggenheim syndicate. With Roosevelt in Africa and his ally Garfield gone from the Interior Department, Pinchot saw himself as the sole protector of his and TR’s policies. Further, he feared Taft and Ballinger’s deliberate and legalistic view of things gravely jeopardized the advances made under Roosevelt, which had often been carried out through presidential commandments that stretched the boundaries of legality—to say the very least.

The firing of the investigator who had brought the charge against Ballinger set in motion a chain of events that in the end prompted Pinchot to send a scathing letter about the whole affair to a conservation ally, Iowa Senator Jonathan P. Dolliver, who famously described Taft as an “amiable man surrounded by men who know exactly what they want.”
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Almost completely forgotten today, Dolliver was one of the most celebrated orators of his time and a leader of the congressional insurgents in the losing effort against what became the Payne-Aldrich Tariff. The chief forester was well aware that his letter, which Dolliver would read out in the Senate, had been sent in direct violation of a presidential edict that any such communications must be made through the department heads. It was only a matter of time before Pinchot’s own head would roll. Robert Bacon, an old Harvard friend of Roosevelt’s who had reluctantly replaced Henry White as U.S. ambassador in Paris, wrote TR, “Is it possible that Gifford, good old Gifford, has got to go too?” He hoped that the rumor was untrue, telling Roosevelt, “It would be a real calamity to have him go wouldn’t it!”
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The Colonel undoubtedly agreed. Three days before he left office he had written Pinchot, “I cannot think of a man in the country whose loss would be a more real misfortune to the nation than yours would.”
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Taft was also very well aware of the close bond between the ex-president and the chief forester. On a tour through the Midwest out to the West Coast meant to rally support for his actions, Taft only added fuel to the fires at a speech at Winona, Minnesota, made in support of standpatter congressman James Tawney. The president threatened the insurgents with expulsion from the party, praised Aldrich, and declared that on the whole he thought the tariff “the best bill that the Republican [P]arty ever passed.”
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This insulting gaffe only increased the already open talk of bringing back Roosevelt in 1912.

In a letter written from the West, Taft complained to his wife Nellie that he had received a “screed” from Silas McBee, the influential editor of
The Churchman
, which supported Pinchot and did “gross injustice” to Ballinger. McBee, Taft told his wife, was “one of those impressionist artists that are so often carried off their feet by Roosevelt’s sermons and preachments and that have very little regard for the substantial methods of making progress through statutes and by lawful steps.” Pinchot had “spread a virus” against Ballinger widely and had used the publicity department of his bureau for the purpose. The chief forester would deny it, but Taft saw traces of this in talks he had with newspapermen, “who assume Ballinger’s guilt, and having convicted him treat any evidence showing that he is a man of strength and honesty as utterly to be disregarded.”
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Dolliver commented to his fellow senatorial insurgent Albert Beveridge that he found it an “incredible thing that as sensible a man as Taft should start out by tying the Aldrich millstone about his neck and traveling like a peddler of damaged goods.” With Pinchot “knocked out and Aldrich in command I think you can hear a lion roar in East Africa.”
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This may have been only wishful thinking on Dolliver’s part, but by this time Roosevelt was growing restive on account of the messages he was receiving, some criticizing Taft and others advising him to stay abroad until after the fall 1910 elections.
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This impatience was reflected in a letter to Lawrence Abbot at the
Outlook
in which TR declared, “As much as I should hate for the White House to see Cannon, Tawney, et al., defeated, I fear I will be unable to delay my return on that account.” To Abbott this clearly signaled that Roosevelt meant to return and speak against them.
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On a more personal level, the Colonel told his sister Anna that he hadn’t the “slightest intention of allowing myself, & poor Edie, to be kept longer away from our home and children.”
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Safely back at Sagamore Hill from her European tour, Edith notified Kermit that the country was “crazy mad about Father” and poor Taft was having a horrid time. Newspapermen in New York, she went on, hungering for TR’s return, had formed a “Back From Elba” club and formally drank the toast at every Saturday meeting.
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On the other hand people close to Taft were telling her to keep her husband out of the country for a year and half longer. When he heard of this, Henry Adams commented, “Why not for life? The ostrich business won’t work forever even among the Hottentots.”
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On November 27, TR’s party began a four-day journey to Lord Delamere’s Equator Ranch at Njoro, where they would complete their hunting in the protectorate. On this march, at the Londiani rail station, Roosevelt dismissed most of the safari’s men as they could take along to their next destination, Uganda and the Nile Valley, only their tent attendants, saises, and the skinners Heller had trained. TR recorded with genuine regret that he was “really sorry to see the last of the big, strong, good-natured porters,” who had been with them for seven months and had behaved well. Much of this he credited to the management of Cuninghame and Tarlton. The Colonel was proud that they had not lost a single man. One had been tossed by a rhino, one clawed by a leopard, and others had been in hospital for various sicknesses, but none had died.
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They would not be so fortunate in Uganda.